In 1990, the police did nothing with the evidence I brought to them following the murder of Anne Kelley. But in spite of my nerve-racking, dead-end experience at the police station, I still assumed the detectives would be knocking on my front door within an hour to interview Walt Williams. If they had, they might have gotten the evidence they needed to make him a person of interest. The day after the murder, Walt went off on a hike. He put on long pants and a long shirt to leave the house, and I thought, God, that looks uncomfortable. It was a hot, muggy day in June, and while I knew he was headed to a wooded area where it made sense to cover your legs for mosquito and tick protection, he’d never done it before. Why all of a sudden, when he always wore shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, was he suddenly covering himself from head to toe? Was he covering scratches on his body?
If the police had interviewed him right away, as I begged them to, they could’ve said, “Roll up your sleeves,” and they might have seen scratches.
Anne Kelley was murdered on Saturday and the evidence was in their hands on Monday, less than forty-eight hours later. They’re gonna come. They’re gonna do what they have to do, I thought. We’d all breathe a sigh of relief, and that would be it. I didn’t want to be a hero. I just wanted the case to be handled, my life to return to normal, and Walt to go away.
TONY TOLD WALT -on my insistence-that he had to leave our home. The day after I went to the police, Walt walked out my door and kept right on going, without ever being considered a suspect.
I was left in a complete void, not understanding what the heck had happened. It was like being in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. It shook my sense of reality. Was I making connections where there were none? The police were not impressed by anything I told them, making me feel that I was a delusional housewife and just making stuff up.
But I never said I knew Walt Williams was the killer of Anne Kelley. What I said was that his behaviors were in line with a person who could have committed her murder, that if one put together his admission of being on the path that night with the evidence I found in his trash and his bizarre behavior, an investigator should want to learn more about this guy. That’s what my brain told me. My information should have led the police immediately to consider him a suspect in this crime, yet it didn’t. That meant either the police were incorrect in their perceptions or I was a pitifully amateur armchair detective.
I COULDN’T GET what had happened out of my mind. I got the newspaper every day expecting I would open it and read, Walt Williams has been arrested for the murder, and I would go back to my normal routine. But time moved on and there was not another word in the paper about the crime. I waited and waited, and finally, confused, I stopped expecting to see a newspaper story with any developments in the investigation.
I went back to homeschooling my children and working nights as a hospital sign language interpreter. As for the police, they never called.
A rumor went around town that the killer of Anne Kelley was another young man, Michael Potter, age eighteen, who lived with his parents in a house that stood right where the path intersected with the road. Michael was known to have hung out with other teenagers in the area where Anne Kelley’s body was found. It was a woodsy area where they would party and smoke pot. The word was that this young man shot himself five days after the crime and that he was the one who murdered Anne.
I was stunned. That was why the police never contacted me. I guess it wasn’t Walt. I must be wrong.
It seemed that it was simply coincidental that Walt exhibited such strange behavior, had circumstantial connections to the crime scene, and junk tossed in his trash; maybe this other young man was equally as disturbed but the one who had actually committed the crime.
I tried to put it out of my head. I was wrong. Michael Potter was the guilty party.
Michael was said to have broken up with his girlfriend the same week Anne was killed. He called his girlfriend in the days following the homicide to tell her he was not happy about something he had done in his life. The thing he was “not happy about” was alleged to be the murder. Yet he never confessed to murdering anyone and no one seemed to know exactly what he was feeling despondent about.
I heard through the police grapevine that there was also supposed to be some blond hair at the scene. The boy had blond hair. And, more important, his DNA was there, and he had scratches in his genital area from the briar bushes.
I thought, Well, that’s pretty good. I don’t know if I could argue that one. There’s DNA, and there’s hair, and scratches. DNA is solid proof. His hair on her, if there was a root still attached, could provide mtDNA for analysis, not as absolute as DNA, but pretty useful as supportive evidence if the mtDNA matched his. And how would he get scratches in the genital area unless he had his pants off and he was raping somebody? If the rumors were true and the evidence existed, he must be the guy.
MEANWHILE, KIM TOLD me that Walt was let go from his job.
Right after he left, the company received a series of unusual bomb threats. Kim said that the man sounded just like Walt.
But as suddenly as the calls started, they stopped, and Walt dropped from sight. Kim never saw him again.
I WOULD HAVE left this whole miserable episode behind me if something hadn’t kept nagging at me. The police never actually stated that Michael Potter killed Anne Kelley, and nothing was ever written up in the newspaper about the case being closed. In theory, it could have been administratively closed because the suspect was dead, but with all that supposed evidence I would think they would let the community know that there was no longer a killer out there. This lack of clarification on the part of law enforcement irked me. Was the case closed or wasn’t it? Did they have positive proof that Potter was the killer or were they only guessing it could be him and no one was challenging their assumption?
I decided to talk to the Potter family. When I told Michael’s parents that I thought their son might be innocent of the murder of Anne Kelley, they welcomed me into their home.
The story they told me was really sad. They were grieving over their son’s suicide, and then five months later the police showed up and insinuated that he killed Anne Kelley. The family was stunned. Why would they accuse their son of doing that? It’s bad enough that a child committed suicide, but then to be told that he sexually assaulted and murderered a woman was another thing altogether.
They said he was always a sweet kid, that they didn’t see any violence in him. Michael wasn’t perfect; he had dropped out of school, and he did have a problem with his girlfriend. He was depressed. He felt like a failure. They believed that was why he killed himself. They couldn’t believe he had anything to do with Anne’s death.
I asked if I could see the autopsy report, and they gave it to me.
There was nothing in the autopsy about any briar marks or scratches anywhere on that boy’s body. The medical examiner should have noted such abrasions if he saw that trauma, however minor. Instead, outside of the damage caused by the actual shotgun blast, the rest of the body was “unremarkable.”
Then I wondered about the rest of what I had heard-whether there was actually blond hair and DNA found that matched Michael.
It turned out that neither existed. That’s why the police couldn’t announce that Michael Potter murdered Anne Kelley. They didn’t have any physical evidence connecting him to the crime, only that he conveniently committed suicide five days later.
I called Anne Kelley’s father, and he said that the police told him that Michael Potter killed his daughter and he was told about the scratches and the matching DNA and hair.
He chose to believe the police, and in his mind, there was nothing more to discuss. He didn’t want to hear anything about it from me or anyone else. He said his wife was satisfied hearing that Michael Potter killed their daughter. She accepted it because believing it gave her closure.
“I don’t want you to ever contact my family again, and if you do, I’ll sue you,” he told me.
And that was the last time I spoke to the Kelley family.
I understood if the police couldn’t develop evidence that Walt was the killer. They had to have evidence; without that, they couldn’t charge him with a crime. Although I thought that the police mishandled the case, I wouldn’t want them to arrest someone without probable cause. That would be another miscarriage of justice.
I could even live with the fact that they thought Michael Potter had something to do with it, if enough of the evidence supported such a conclusion.
But when they pinned the crime on him and told the grieving families of both Michael Potter and Anne Kelley, that crossed the line for me. That, to me, was inexcusable.
Why wouldn’t they do their job? Why didn’t they just bring Walt in and interview him? Why didn’t they take a DNA sample from him? And if they still couldn’t bring a case and an alleged perpetrator to court, then at least they would have tried.
In my opinion, if anyone stopped to compare the evidence supporting Walt Williams’s possible involvement in the murder and the evidence supporting Michael Potter’s, they would have a few short lines on Potter’s side of the paper and a whole lot of lines on Williams’s side. But for some reason-for some yet unclear reason-I believed the police department simply ignored the better suspect.
People ask, is there a perfect crime? I say, no, there isn’t, but there are plenty of “good enough” crimes. They’re good enough because nobody saw anything, they’re good enough because the body was in water and the evidence got washed away, or they’re good enough because the body wasn’t found for three or four weeks until the dog walker tripped over it and there it was. They’re good enough if the police had a “damn good” suspect but still looked the other way.
Because there are so many good enough crimes, a substantial portion of crimes will never be prosecuted because the evidence won’t be there.
Citizens should have cared more about an innocent girl being slaughtered in their town; they should have protested when they never got an answer as to who killed her. But no one spoke up except me. And when I did, I was told to forget about it. If a woman is murdered in the woods and nobody speaks up, does this mean the victim and the homicide don’t really matter? The system did not function properly. We should all care more about our fellow man and about doing what’s right. That’s what spurred me on the path of becoming a professional criminal profiler.
I DECIDED TO educate myself about psychopaths, serial killers, and serial homicide investigation. I spent the next four years at the “Pat Brown School of Criminal Profiling,” which held study sessions in patients’ hospital rooms, doctors’ waiting rooms, and emergency rooms.
I wanted to know more about the field of profiling and serial homicide investigation. I wanted to learn about forensics and psychopathy. I wanted to learn how to analyze, dissect, and reconstruct a crime.
The first thing I did was look for a college-level program. I had a liberal arts degree, which was heavy in anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Those fields were surprisingly useful because I had studied how people behave in society-in the United States and in other countries. I studied how people behave in subcultures, how men and women deal with each other, and their roles within their communities. I learned about deviant behavior and why people commit criminal acts.
But I didn’t have any formal education in criminal profiling or in criminal behavior, crime reconstruction, and forensics, the three fields that are the foundation of criminal profiling. The University of Maryland, near where I lived, offered a criminal justice program, but nothing really useful for profiling. In fact, there was nothing in the entire United States for those not in law enforcement that was focused on criminal profiling. I found a forensics program at George Washington University, but it was pretty much a lab program. The course really wasn’t geared toward criminal profiling, and I wasn’t interested in getting a job as a technician.
There were many programs in psychology-which people often think is what criminal profiling is based on. A profiler is supposed to understand the behavior and the mind-set of the killer, but little of psychology is ever about aberrant behavior and psychopathy. Most of what was taught was general psychology, which didn’t apply to murderers and psychopaths. The few courses I found that focused on deviant psychology and mental disorders were all about treatment, and I couldn’t have cared less about curing rapists and murderers. I figured that by the time you were a bona fide serial killer, you were a hopeless case and a nasty piece of work. I am not one of those who believe that psychologists can rehabilitate a guy who has killed ten women. And even if he could be rehabilitated, he doesn’t deserve the chance. I always say, when you bring the dead woman back to life, then you can give the killer treatment.
So how was I going to learn criminal profiling?
The only straight-line methodology I found was joining the FBI. First of all, I was too old; they wouldn’t even let me try. Second, when you join the FBI, you don’t just become a criminal profiler. You can’t say, “Now that I have joined, this is what I want to do.” You become an agent, and twenty years later, you might still be sitting in Iowa doing whatever FBI agents do in Iowa. Maybe someday, if you were really, really lucky, you’d become a criminal profiler; but then again maybe you wouldn’t. So for me, the FBI was out. I had to find some other way. What was left? That’s what I wanted to know.
There was nothing out there, apparently, so I concluded the only solution was to create my own criminal profiling program, study it on my own, and take advantage of anything complementary that I could find.
I found courses offered online by Brent Turvey, who has a master’s degree in forensic science. Turvey was one of the first independent profilers in the country and he strongly encouraged the Sherlock Holmes scientific method of deduction that he called “Deductive Profiling.” He may have a master’s in forensics but he clearly studied much on his own to learn all the other skills necessary to profiling. These weren’t accredited college courses, but they were informative and I was gathering my education from every existing source that I could find.
I took all the classes that Turvey offered, purchased the recommended textbooks, and learned a great deal. That opened the door to attending a serial homicide conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a death investigation conference in Florida. These experiences exposed me to the skills and tools I needed, acquired at the feet of some of the world’s most accomplished detectives and crime analysts.
On my own, I read and studied some four hundred books related to profiling, crime analysis, serial homicide, and forensics over the next four years. There is nothing better for studying than hours and hours of quiet time at the hospital waiting for the doctor to come in, the surgery to end, and the patient to wake up.
Later on, I earned a master’s degree in criminal justice because I wanted to learn more about police operations and procedures and the challenges of the criminal justice system in general. It wasn’t criminal profiling, but it was an issue with which I was concerned.
The fact is that people are stuck on the concept that you must attend a particular program that certifies you as a criminal profiler. But to date, there are no specific requirements for participation in the field. Any way that you learn, as long as you gain the skills and you understand the field, is an education. A college program is a wonderful opportunity if such a program exists (and today there is a college-level criminal profiling certificate program available that I developed for Excelsior College) but, even with a college program under one’s belt, learning is an ongoing process and one should always seek new information and skills.
During that time, I began to develop my own idea of what was wrong with the present practice of criminal profiling. I disagreed with a lot of what I read. Much of it didn’t even make sense. Some of the methodologies I was reading about seemed like hocus-pocus to me. I couldn’t fathom anything scientific behind certain theories that added up to nothing more than picking something out of a hat.
There was sleight-of-hand being sold by a few profilers who had been practicing for a long time. I’m not saying they didn’t do a good job when they worked their cases; I’m not saying they weren’t good profilers. But by the time they shared their techniques in books, everything became a show of “How brilliant I am” and “How every profile I did matched the suspect perfectly!”
Oh, please! There’s no way you could have gotten those things right, because the methodology didn’t make any sense. You couldn’t have known the things you claimed. Profiles are science, not magic.
I watched a television show about famed FBI profiler John Douglas and a case he worked on in Alaska. On the show, Douglas theorized that when they found the perpetrator, he would have a stutter, and he did! Now how in the world would anybody-I don’t care how much training you’ve got-figure out that a guy who committed a particular crime stutters? From where do you get that? Well, Hollywood twisted the story around like they so often do.
It turned out that the police already had a suspect in mind, and they asked Douglas if he thought that the man they had in custody could be the serial killer, this man who owned a small plane and stuttered. Douglas profiled the crime and, since the profile matched the police suspect, he said the killer would be a stutterer. He already knew that the guy stuttered, but the television show didn’t make that clear. In his book Mindhunter, Douglas points out that he knew the suspect stuttered, but Hollywood made him seem like he could pick this trait out because of his brilliance.
While the Hollywood spin on profilers makes for exciting reading, students of profiling are often mystified and discouraged because they can’t understand how they could ever possibly figure the same things out-what color car the suspect drives, that he likes to watch the news, that he is a sports lover. I have news for them. I can’t figure those things out, either.
SOMETIMES, A PROFILER applies inductive profiling to a case.
A sexual homicide is almost always committed by males. How often do you see a woman convicted of sexual assault? Almost never. It’s an extremely unusual crime. A profiler could take statistical information and say, “If you have a girl who’s been raped, then I’m going to say it was by a man.” Anyone can guess that. And most males who commit crimes are between twenty-two and thirty-two. We can start creating a profile by staying with the safe bets: “The sexual assaults were committed by a man between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two.” Then if a guy committed a number of poorly planned crimes, all locally, I could say what he’s not doing well in his life: he’s probably unable to maintain a job or a relationship. And he’s not very clever. I bet I will still be batting close to a thousand with this profile.
But unusual guesses, like a stutter, could not possibly be known logically or statistically.
As I learned about profiling, I discovered that there was a great deal of mythology about the field-promoted by profilers themselves-to make profilers seem like some kind of gods. They want the police and general public believing there are only so many people in the world who could ever do this, because they’re so brilliant and gifted. They can simply look at a scene and-voilà!-they know all the answers. It’s ridiculous.
Brent Turvey pushed for establishing an increasingly scientific practice of criminal profiling. I support his efforts and have continued to promote the deductive method of criminal profiling-one based on evidence, the scientific method, and solid explanations for profile determinations.
A profiler has to spend a long time studying autopsy reports and crime scene photos, doing crime role plays, crime reconstructing, and crime analysis. It is hard work. Deductive profiling isn’t as “sexy” and “mystical” as profiling that makes amazing conclusions through inside information or luck, but it is a much better tool for homicide investigators, and that is the only thing that really matters.
IN 1995, FIVE years after the Anne Kelley murder, I still believed Walt Williams should be a suspect.
Now having greater knowledge and training, I went back into Walt’s history to question once more whether I was right about him, and if he could be connected to any other homicides in the area.
Starting anew with the Anne Kelley homicide, I found it hard to believe that a crime of this nature would be a perpetrator’s first and only crime. Kelley was bludgeoned and strangled. She was sexually assaulted and brutalized. The description of what happened to Anne was one of the reasons I never believed that Michael Potter, just turning eighteen, could have committed a crime this brutal.
I started building a background of Williams by interviewing the people with whom he had worked. The past is the first place to look for psychopathic tendencies. Many times on television, an interviewer says to me of a crime suspect, “Well, everybody says he’s a great guy.” I say, “No, no, they’re saying that now, before they have had a chance to reflect, but look back into his past-really look-and you’ll uncover all his psychopathic behaviors. They were there for years and years, ever since he was a kid.”
The prospects of interviewing people made me nervous, because I had never conducted an investigation before. I had never knocked on strangers’ doors and I didn’t know how people would respond to me. I felt kind of silly, actually, like a new salesperson making cold calls to advertise some product. Even when I was a Girl Scout, I didn’t like selling cookies.
I had now completed all of my studies and had reached a point where I considered myself a criminal profiler, whether anybody else wanted to consider me one or not. I designed my first business card and off I went to test the response.
I decided to start with Walt’s former employers, and the response I received was incredible.
I went to a law office in D.C. where he worked as a clerk just before he moved into my house. When I got there, I said, “I’m a private investigator,” and I handed my P.I. license to the receptionist. “I would like to talk to somebody who Walt Williams would have worked under. I’m looking into some of his past work history.”
The receptionist went away and a fellow came running from the back room and actually leaped over the counter. No kidding, leaped.
“Walt Williams?” he cried. “Oh, my God, that guy?”
He hauled me back to his office, and he couldn’t stop ranting and raving. “That guy was trouble. He would come to work wearing a black fishnet shirt. I’m like, ‘Walt, it’s a law office. What are you doing in a black fishnet shirt?’ Or he’d be dressed like a comic book character. He was obsessed with comic books, Spider-Man and other juvenilia like that. He was a twenty-three-year-old guy enamored with this kid stuff.”
According to this attorney, Walt behaved inappropriately with women in the office. They were uniformly uncomfortable around him. And he was always coming up with excuses for not getting things done.
“Why did you hire him?” I asked.
“Have you ever tried to hire somebody for a job as a mail clerk? You get pond scum,” he said. “But Walt came in, he was dressed in a suit, and he had a great résumé-”
“Which was a pack of lies,” I said.
He looked embarrassed. “I know that now.”
He handed me Walt’s résumé-it was quite amusing to read, and I was also amazed that this man still had the paper in his files so many years later; Walt must really have gotten his goat. I said, “How come, when his next employer called you up to get a recommendation, they were told he was a great worker?”
He shrugged.
“I just wanted to get rid of him.”
As we all know, many people lie about their ex-employees these days. They don’t want to get sued for telling the truth, which is why recommendations have become rather useless. When I told my friend Kim, who hired and dated Walt, she was furious. She said, “Oh, that’s just great. They sicced him on us knowing darn well he was a terrible employee.”
Reading Walt’s résumé for the first time I learned some fascinating tidbits. He wrote that he did “secret work” for an air force colonel. Really? I actually located the “colonel.” He laughed when I called. “Walt worked as a mail clerk in my office in Virginia,” he said. “I’ve been in the military, but I’ve never been a colonel.” That was a gross exaggeration.
Walt worked for a department store, as a security guard, so I went there.
“Oh, that guy?” his supervisor said. “Geez, he was so creepy. He was the only person who worked for me to whom I wouldn’t give my pager number. I didn’t want to be contacted by him. Walt told me once that he was going to snipe me on the way into work, ‘joking’ about gunning me down. Once he said that he had gloves that had stun guns in them so he could knock people out. Another day, Walt told me that he got a girl pregnant, and I said, ‘Is she going to get an abortion?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do it myself.’ That totally freaked me out.”
I drove two hours south to meet with his father. I honestly didn’t expect him to speak with me. I rang the doorbell and when he answered, I explained who I was.
“I’m a criminal profiler, and I’m trying to learn a little bit more about your son, because he’s either committed a serious crime, or he’s gotten himself into trouble by making himself look like he committed the crime.”
Walt’s father looked at me and rolled his eyes.
“Come on in,” he said.
We spent the next two hours talking and he told me all kinds of things about Walt from way back when he was a child. “He’s always been a problem,” he said. “I had a difficult time with him. I’ve had problems with him constantly lying, and one time he stole a bunch of quarters from me, I think it was a jar.”
He told me Walt couldn’t keep a job, had no ambition, and all he wanted to do was play Dungeons & Dragons with his loser friends. He was a disappointment as a son.
His dad said that Walt served in the air force, but that he was discharged because the military said he was schizoid. He used the word “schizoid.” Walt later told me himself that he was let go because they also said he had a personality disorder. I thought that was interesting, because I believed he had a personality disorder and not a mental illness. How long did it take the air force to discover and make this evaluation? Four months.
When our interview ended, Walt’s father said, “If you need any more help, you let me know.” He could have slammed the door in my face, but he didn’t. In fact, he gave me new insight into his son.
My confidence was building with regard to my ability to run a background interview, and my suspicions about Walt were growing. Next I tracked down his sister.
She also invited me into her home and I sat down with her for two hours. At one point her husband and kids joined the conversation, and everybody had something to say about Walt.
She cried and said, “I’ve never understood what was wrong with him. All my life, I’ve had problems with him.”
Her husband said, “He creeps me out completely.”
And the kids added, “Uncle Walt creeps us out, too.”
They described incident after incident in which Walt struggled with the people around him and displayed peculiar behaviors.
Everyone I asked for an interview agreed. The family did not seem shocked or shaken that I was investigating him in connection with a sexual homicide. How many families would not object to a stranger sitting in their living room and questioning them as to whether their son, brother, brother-in-law, or uncle might be a murderer? Walt’s family members weren’t upset at all. Not one of them.
I TOOK THE information gained from my interviews and turned it over to the police department that had jurisdiction over the crime. In the beginning there had been a dispute over who should work the case; the park police, because Anne Kelley was murdered in the park, or the county police, because the park was within county jurisdiction. It would have been better for the county police to handle the case, because they had a lot of experience with murder investigations and the park police had very little. I never knew why the park police won out, but it was clearly their case. I had to go back to them with my new information and I got another tepid response, but I handed over the information anyway and went away again. I had compiled a substantial history on Walt, including all the places I knew he had worked, and a list of his old girlfriends. Whether he murdered Anne Kelley or not, I did not know, because that must be proved with evidence, but based on my investigation, there was no doubt in my mind that he should be a suspect or at least a person of interest. Information about him now came not just from one “bored housewife” but also from employers, family, and friends. Now there were even more reasons for the police to take a look at Walt Williams. I could only hope they would.
IN THE SPRING of 1996 I got the phone call that I had been waiting for for the last six years. Walt Williams finally became the number one suspect in the murder of Anne Kelley.
A new investigator had taken over the case, and he said, “Can you come in? I want to interview you about Walt Williams.”
I said, “Thank God.”
We talked the next day at police headquarters. I was back in the same building I had first walked into carrying my cardboard box of evidence all those years before. The investigator looked at me, motioned toward the evidence-my evidence-sitting on the table in between us, and shook his head. “I don’t know why they missed this the first time around. This is crazy. This is crazy.”
The police picked Walt up, brought him in for an interview, and polygraphed him. The police told me afterward that they laughed about his interview because it was full of bogus information. They were most amused that he had been given the “option” to leave the air force as part of a “Manpower Reduction Program.” They said that he now had an alibi for the night that Anne Kelley was murdered, that he had been playing softball at the time. That was an alibi we could strike down, because he told me that he left Kim’s and came back to the house. He never mentioned a softball game to me.
The polygraph showed that he was being deceptive. “He’s our guy. We know it’s him. We got his DNA and we’re waiting on the test to come back.” I don’t know if Williams gave consent for the tests willingly or if he was pressured into it or if there was a court order, but I was happy to hear that they were going after physical evidence.
Then the investigator looked at me and said, “You should watch your back. Walt’s really angry now.”
I said, “Can I get a Maryland gun permit? A carry permit?”
The police said no. In Maryland, you can get a carry permit only if your life is being threatened, and since Walt hadn’t threatened me, I couldn’t get one.
So that was that. I went home, relieved it was almost over, exhilarated that all my hard work had paid off, and thankful my analysis of Walt Williams hadn’t been so wrong after all. Then I waited, and I waited, and I waited.
People think DNA tests come back quickly, but this one took five months. While intellectually I never thought he’d come after me, and he didn’t, emotionally it was unnerving to know that he was out there and angry. He knew who turned him in and he heard that I had visited his relatives asking questions, so there was no doubt in his mind that he ended up being interviewed by the police six years after the murder because of me.
I kept calling and calling the police station. “What’s going on, what’s going on?” Finally the investigators received the test results.
“Walt has been excluded by the DNA,” the detective told me.
“WHAT?” I shrieked.
He said, “Yeah, the DNA excluded him. He’s no longer a suspect.”
I went berserk. I was just blown away. I could not understand it. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s been excluded.”
“I don’t believe this,” I said. “I can believe that it’s inconclusive-that I can buy. ‘It’s inconclusive’-we don’t have enough DNA to prove he did or didn’t do it. I can accept that and it’s okay with me if you can’t take it to court. You can tell me that and I’m not going to hound you over it. But please don’t lie to me.”
“Mrs. Brown,” he said, “you need to get a life.”
I DID GET a life, and I decided something needed to be done about the police investigative system, because I no longer believed that catching killers was being handled properly. The system was failing and innocent people, mostly women, were going to be killed because of it.
Some people said, “You just can’t accept defeat. You totally believe this guy killed this girl, and that’s all there is to it. No matter what evidence there is, you’re going to believe he did it, and you won’t admit you were wrong. You’ve got some kind of issue that you’ve just got to prove yourself. You’re just obsessed.”
But my problem wasn’t that. The investigator’s justification didn’t make sense to me. I’d grown distrustful of how the system worked, and I wanted proof. Six years ago I was told Michael Potter killed Anne Kelley, but that was never proven. Now I was being told Walt didn’t do it and they were looking for someone else. If Walt’s DNA didn’t match the DNA at the crime, then he was innocent. But I wanted proof. Prove to me he didn’t commit the crime.
For a year, I called and called, pushing for the right to see the DNA report. I was always refused. One day, for some reason, I got hold of another investigator and he read the DNA report to me! Go figure. But what a bonanza, because that officer said, “There were no PCR products obtainable from the sperm factions.” In other words, There was no DNA. A later statement by the Maryland State ’s Attorney’s Office confirmed what the detective had told me: “There is no DNA evidence to take anyone to trial.”
One of the reasons they could not confirm that Anne’s killer was Walt was that there simply wasn’t any DNA found in or on Anne Kelley that could link him to the murder. The results were inconclusive. He had not been excluded.
I was furious, because the investigator did lie to me.
Now I knew that the DNA was inconclusive and that Walt should still be a suspect. And I wondered whether they ever tested the condom I found in his trash. It didn’t seem that they had, but if he were the killer, the victim’s DNA might have been found on that. I guess they didn’t think killers ever used them.
SOMETIMES I LOOK back at the Anne Kelley case and I realize the first investigator wasn’t especially skilled at solving cases. The park police had never had a murder in their jurisdiction before, so this guy probably had little or no experience in homicide or criminal profiling or psychopathology. And in comes a housewife with a box, she tells him a great story, and he shrugs it off.
And then there were the politics involved in the particular case, which no one could have predicted and I didn’t learn about until almost a decade after the crime.
Anne Kelley’s family was friends with George W. Bush, the future president and, in 1990, son of the then-president of the United States. The family reportedly asked W. to help them. W. reportedly called Bush Sr., and he called the state’s attorney, who was told to take good care of this case.
I was told that the state’s attorney was pursuing a federal judgeship, and he did not want his career going down the toilet because of a police department that had never handled a murder. So when Michael Potter, an eighteen-year-old boy who lived near the wooded path where Anne was murdered, blew his brains out five days later, the police said, “Eureka, he’s the guy who did it! Case closed.” Everybody went home happy. Except me.
It took nearly ten years and a volatile town meeting to find out that information. The park police showed up to defend their handling of the case and bragged about how hard they worked on it because Anne Kelley’s family knew the Bushes.
Then, behind closed doors, they told me Walt Williams was still the one and only suspect.
THERE WAS NOT much more I could accomplish on the Anne Kelley case. All I could do was keep an eye on Walt’s whereabouts.
Then he got married. Married! Walt had problems dating. Girls refused to go out with him; girls dumped him. Kim lasted a month and she still wonders why she gave him a chance. Now Walt was married. To a “smart” woman, with a master’s degree, who worked for a college. She was also a religious woman and she didn’t tolerate drinking or drugs. Her mother told me that she had reported her first husband to the police when she found marijuana in their home. But here she was with Walt. And they had a child.
I felt bad about suspecting a family man, but I couldn’t let that sway me. I went to see Walt’s wife’s mother. She gave me a nice two-hour interview. “Yes, Walt is a bit odd and I know he has some problems, but what man doesn’t?”
“Did he tell you what he did for a living?”
“I believe he was a police officer with the MPD at the time. He left the job to have more time with his wife.”
The interview proved that Walt was still lying. I knew he couldn’t qualify for a job with any police department. I sent Walt’s wife an e-mail and attached all the information about Walt on it. I told her his background and that he had been a suspect in a sexual homicide.
She got mad. She e-mailed me back and told me to “be a woman” and talk straight to Walt about my suspicions. Okay; I called.
“Hey, Walt!”
“Hey, Pat, how are you doing?”
Walt was mighty jovial that day. I could hear his wife telling him to find out what my problem was. I told Walt that he needed to clear up a decade of lies if he wanted me to think he wasn’t involved in the Kelley crime.
Walt admitted to what I already knew and could prove and denied anything he thought I was unsure of or couldn’t prove. I asked him questions over the phone while his wife listened in. I couldn’t tape the conversation without his consent because I lived in a state where this was illegal, but I am a fast typist and I transcribed the questions and answers.
WALT WILLIAMS: “I NEVER walked that path home. I don’t like the path. That night I broke up with Kim, she told me she didn’t want to see me anymore. It was starting to get dark on the way home and I said, ‘Hell, no way, I’m not walking down this path.’”
(This was the first time I had any idea as to the exact time he walked down that path. Originally when he told me the story, he simply said he was on the path; he gave no time frame. Now that he stated it was getting dark, this put him even closer to the time of the murder. If he was telling the truth here-about it becoming dark when he “decided to cross the stream”-then if he did NOT do what he said, he would have ended up at the site of the murder approximately the same time as Anne Kelley.)
WILLIAMS: “I decided to jump from this side of the stream bank to the other. I lowered myself and I ended up landing in the water. It was waist deep to my surprise and I pulled myself up, dirty, muddy, and wet.”
(He also mentioned it was too far to go back to the road on the path and too far to the next road to continue. I have looked at the location. It would have been approximately a five-minute walk to the intersection of the next road.)
WILLIAMS: “I threw my clothes away. I don’t like wet jeans and threw them away-after they get wet, they get hard as a rock. After shoes dry out they don’t feel right. Yeah, I washed them before I threw them out. I wiped the mud off my shoes with the plastic because I didn’t want to track it into the house.
“The condom was just curiosity. I had never used one before. I didn’t ejaculate in it.”
(That was likely a lie because the condom was stuck together and stiff.)
“It was just taken out of the pack and put back. I threw them away because I didn’t need them because I wasn’t with Kim anymore.”
(I asked him about his paranoia of AIDS and his time in the military.)
“Yes, I had sex but AIDS was not a fear back then; I just picked girls that looked healthy.
“The letter opener was really a throwing knife I bought at Beltway Plaza when they had a store with martial arts stuff.”
(When I had seen this in the trash after the murder, I didn’t recognize what it was. It looked like a filed-down letter opener. Having looked at martial arts equipment since then, it did indeed look like a throwing knife and this was more consistent with what Walt would have owned. It is still interesting that he tossed a perfectly good knife.)
WILLIAMS: “The next day I covered my arms and legs because it was cool in the mountains. I always did that.
“The night of the murder, Kim and I broke up and she came over and stayed in the [Brown] house. She was on the bed and I was on the floor on a mattress. I had called her on the phone and talked with her-I was hurt. I did everything I could to get her to come over and she did.”
(I questioned Walt on this and he then admitted maybe it wasn’t that night-I had no recollection of Kim EVER staying overnight in our home, especially in his room.)
WILLIAMS: “The park police left a message on my voice mail. They called three times. I called them back. They said maybe I could help in this investigation and they picked me up.
“They told me to write down where I was living. [The detective] told me to write down the names of the girls I dated. Then he read me my rights.
“He told me he had been looking for me for a year. I was in the next county over, so I don’t see why he would have any trouble finding me. I moved there about six months after I was put out of your house.
“In February, I was incensed. I told the detective, ‘When you see I had nothing to do with anything, I want an apology.’
“He showed me an artist’s rendition…from somewhere and asked if it didn’t look like me and I said no.”
WILLIAMS: “I didn’t get the name of the girl that was murdered. I started getting irritated. He said, ‘Why don’t you take a lie detector test?’ and I said, ‘Fine.’ I fell asleep during the time they were setting it up.”
WILLIAMS: “I asked ‘Why am I here?’ but they never gave me any answers. They kept me six hours and I missed my work. Then he said, ‘What about a blood test?’ I said fine and we went to the hospital.
“They didn’t tell me anything about why they brought me in.
“I volunteered for both tests.
“I called the police department every day. Nobody would tell me anything.
“Finally, I got the detective and he told me I was excluded by the DNA and he was sorry he had been so hard on me.
“I should sue them for the way they treated me.”
(We also discussed Walt’s work and dating history; he disputed the veracity of much of my information.)
WILLIAMS: “I did NOT call in bomb threats. I went to pick up my check. I came back to visit and someone said, ‘Walt did it.’
“I quit-they didn’t fire me.
“I didn’t get fired from that security job, either…
“I worked for that man but he wasn’t a colonel.
“All of my life, I have kept my family at arm’s length.
“I lived with my aunt-yes, I was suicidal.
“Tiffany Byrd was the girl decapitated on prom night. No, she was not my girlfriend. I made that up.”
(Byrd did die on prom night in an accident. She did not get decapitated. She was not from Walt’s school and he apparently borrowed the story from either the paper or friends.)
WILLIAMS: “I know I have done some extremely stupid things. I just wanted to be accepted. I wanted sympathy.
“I never stole anything except some quarters from my father’s piggy bank during high school.”
(He knew I had talked to his dad.)
WILLIAMS: “I got depressed in the air force. Didn’t like my job classification. They sent me to another base for evaluation. Said I had a personality disorder.
“I was upset when my father remarried. He changed completely. The woman was a friend of the family and I didn’t like her and I wondered if she was around before my mother died.”
WILLIAMS: “No, my mother didn’t die in my arms.
“I am very close to my sister. I talk to her every day. No, she hasn’t seen my son yet. I will get over that way one day. I sent her pictures.”
(His sister says he does tend to call her every day for weird abbreviated conversations but she had seen him only once after he got married.)
WILLIAMS: “I tried for the MPD, but that one dropped charge on my record for supposedly carrying a machete on a college campus screwed me up.
“My wife and I knew each other one week before we got married. Met through the phone dating line. I fell in love instantly. We knew we were for each other. I put the message on in August. I said, ‘I am Walt. I work as an SPO [special police officer]. These are my interests.’”
WILLIAMS: “No, I didn’t have any college. I said that because I was ashamed when I got married.”
(Walt put down that he attended college for three years on their marriage certificate.)
WILLIAMS: “I have never felt I was good enough for anybody. I wanted so much to be useful to someone; I tried too hard.
“If I didn’t know the person, it wouldn’t concern me.”
(This was in response to my question of why he was so blasé about the murder of Anne Kelley.)
Walt said that he spoke in such detail with me after all these years because he wanted to set everything straight. He said that my investigation and suspicion of him changed his life for the better and he no longer tells lies and foolish stories. He now tells only the truth. He practically thanked me for getting him in this situation and making him face his foolish behaviors.
It was interesting to note that Walt wanted to set things straight only after I contacted his wife and she wanted me to talk to him. Until then, although he had my phone number and knew where I lived, he never attempted to contact me and discuss anything. He never called me to tell me to knock it off. It was my conclusion that he simply wanted to impress his wife with his “honesty” so she would think I was the crazy one.
What struck me as odd in this conversation was that Walt talked to me as though I were a close friend, although he knew me for only four weeks in 1990 as his landlord. Why the strong connection? Why no hostility? Perhaps Walt was telling the truth and he was just one great guy, but more likely it was one major snow job. His wife stayed on for a few more years and then divorced him.
I was happy to find out that Walt was on the path exactly at the time Anne Kelley was murdered. In 2009, a detective from a town nearby told me that Walt Williams remained the only suspect in the murder of Anne Kelley.
WHEN I LOOK back on twenty years of dealing with the murder of Anne Kelley and the walking anachronism that is Walt Williams, I still wish more than anything that this case could be resolved.
I have the private satisfaction that the police still consider him a top suspect, that they agree the circumstantial evidence is convincing enough to believe Williams might have committed the murder. Sure, there is always a possibility that Williams is a nutjob who lies and says and does stupid things and on the same night that he waded across the stream, another killer popped out of the bushes and murdered Anne. Anything is possible, and that’s why you have to have enough evidence to convince a jury that a suspect is truly guilty.
Although I know that I was justified in gathering evidence and pushing for the police to pay serious attention to Williams, everyone just got the story secondhand from me. If I had to go to a court of law to prove Williams should be the number one suspect, I could do it; I have enough statements, written and oral, to back my claim. I couldn’t prove he did it, but I could prove the police should have investigated him thoroughly.
But nobody else-and I mean nobody-saw what I saw and experienced what I experienced.
I didn’t go looking for this case. It came to me. I never thought the world of Sherlock Holmes I enjoyed as a child would become my reality three decades later. Sometimes fate takes a very strange turn. Here I was, a homemaker and sign language interpreter no more.
I was a criminal profiler.